Agrim HFC is a new age HFC that caters to the informal and semi-formal self-employed businesses using a mix of technology and human touch

Agrim Housing Finance

The vast nothingness of the Real Estate Bitcoin Wealth Expo. A sucker for experiences of the deeply surreal kind, I could not miss the chance on Saturday to see Sylvester Stallone and Pitbull lining up alongside a bunch of Z-listers and get-rich-quick tricksters to give motivational talks to thousands of bewildered Torontonians. The had done enough to lure me in. What was once the humble had become the (like moths to a flame), and this year with a genuine superstar on the roster thanks to Sly inexplicably agreeing to do the gig. car crash of a subway ad Real Estate Wealth Expo Real Estate BITCOIN Wealth Expo Learn how to become a millionaire, the ravenous hordes had been promised, and with a grim predictability they flocked to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre dreaming of easy fortunes and burning with materialistic desires. The organizers had gone to considerable lengths to distract guests from the event’s sinister intentions ( , and the Expo strategically tours cities in need of buyers, ), deploying an army of enthusiastic staff to work the floor and putting up posters of inspirational quotes at every turn. Toronto home sales have fallen 40% year-over-year MacLean’s reported last year As I descend the Convention Centre’s escalators into the pits of hell, I am high-fived by a Willy Wonka-era Gene Wilder lookalike. I overhear a man on the phone say he’s at a “stupid networking thing” as I pick up my badge at the registration desk, and a woman sporting a deranged grin asks if I’m “pumped”. ‘Bitcoin’ missing from the logo on the posters. Upon entering the enormous main hall, it takes roughly three seconds to hear the first David Brent-ism, courtesy of Brian Allen and his ‘Real Estate Funding & Flipping’ talk. “Ever heard of real estate? No?” he quips. “How many of you still have money in the bank?” I’d been there just two minutes and already Steve Jobs and his motto “think different” were showing on the big screen. “You don’t need an education for real estate,” Allen tells the audience, before recounting the story of a young man who — despite having “the IQ of a lamppost” — earned enough money from quick-and-dirty housing investments to buy his very own Range Rover. He calls a Niagara couple up to the stage to tell their success story. “I’m not too skeptical”, the husband chuckles. “My wife has saved me from a few bad deals.” His secret to getting real estate rich: “Just get off your duff and do it!” A feeling of vast emptiness washes over me. The is a paradox: it is so perfectly , yet also somehow encapsulates ill in modern society. Every detail here, big and small, seems magnified; the place is loaded with cautionary tales of headless consumerism — with the horrors of a human being’s purpose reduced to numbers on a screen. “Think like Americans!” Allen commands his audience of dead-eyed disciples. Real Estate Bitcoin Wealth Expo nothing everything “I was diagnosed with ADD, I wasn’t too smart,” he continues. But that wasn’t about to stop him. “The whole school system is broken. They teach you how to make somebody else rich!” The talk had settled into a familiar pattern: OK, you’re dumb, but look, it takes ten minutes to vet a property, and even can do it. Just be fearless. That word — fear — is exploited time and time again, goading people to rip apart any dangling thread of skepticism that might be holding their lives together. you I see a woman wearing heels so high she can barely walk. “I know I look like I’m on drugs, but I’m not,” Allen assures us as he wraps things up. “Real estate is my drug.” After the talk, I watch people quite literally waving their credit cards in the air as they clamour to sign up for his $1,000 3-day course. As I observe, I wonder how these people manage to live day-to-day in such spontaneous chaos. It’s a lot to take in so early in the day. Time to stretch my legs. I meander out of the main hall and up to the next floor in search of more insanity. There are seven smaller rooms with talks going on throughout the day. I look over the schedule to see what interests me — let’s try ‘eCommerce Biz’ with Mark Stone. I walk in to him pitching his wholesome American lifestyle — baseball and apple pie stuff — all made possible by his multi-million-dollar Amazon Seller businesses which, he swears, were oh-so-easy to get off the ground. Zero mention of the years of hard work and dedication it really took, or of the long hours he presumably still puts in — that’s not what people are here to hear. One telltale crack does appear in Stone’s robust veneer of uber-positivity: “I lost a of money at one point,” he admits. “I needed about $3,000 worth of therapy.” Notice how even his mental wellbeing is described in terms of how many dollars it cost to fix. It wasn’t yet noon and already my misanthropy had reached record highs. lot I emerge from Stone’s rudimentary lesson a near broken man in search of something — anything — to wash its icky residue from my mind. Many of the talks are about the latest investing fads; whatever buzzword they can use to get people through the door. Not only are several about Bitcoin, but there are also sessions on Ethereum and cannabis. Long lines form outside all the rooms, and hundreds of disappointed guests are left roaming the corridors, not sure what to do with themselves. ‘Toke Biz’ was one I was determined not to miss, so I got in line 20 minutes early. A weed bro lines up behind me, looking as though he wants to strike up a conversation. I’m careful not to meet his eye. Mercifully, two friendly-looking gentlemen join the queue behind him, and he takes his chance. “I’m going to school for horticulture,” he tells them enthusiastically. “I want to actually it, ya’ know?” grow The smell of aftershave and chewing gum blends into a heady mix as we shuffle in for the talk. An old Japanese man, Ted Ohashi (real name, as far as I can tell), takes the floor to address a crowd made up mostly of millennials (never have I seen a generational divide so blatantly apparent than at the — weed and cryptos for the kids, real estate for the Boomers). Real Estate Bitcoin Cannabis Wealth Expo As Ohashi very slowly reels off some marijuana facts everyone already knows, the bespectacled fellow next to me leans over to his friend and whispers, “he’s on some Indica right now”. Pleased with his observation, he rolls a joint cheerfully, and I feel like smashing my head in on the chair in front of me. definitely After enduring fifteen minutes of ‘Toke Biz’, I head back out into the corridor to take a fresh reading of the atmosphere, walking past the Gene Wilder lookalike a third time. He’s still giving out high fives. I catch the backend of a panel discussion about cryptocurrencies in the main hall. A man wearing a poncho and a top hat adorned with a yellow feather is giving people Bitcoin investing advice using economics language (I later learn it was former child actor Brock Pierce). This is the world we now live in. Oddly for what was billed as a real estate and bitcoin event, podcasting — another of those words currently putting dollar signs in people’s eyes — had also found its way onto the agenda. I line up for veteran podcaster Adam Carolla’s ‘master class’. A staff member excitedly asks if podcasting is how I’m going to make my millions. Carolla’s talk kicks off with some Boomer-tier humour and carries on with a sprinkling of celebrity namedropping, inane anecdotes and corny digressions. There are fewer suits in this crowd, and more people who believe their paths to fortune lie in the blazing uniqueness of their personalities. “How long should a podcast be?” asks one aspiring internet star earnestly. A Real Estate Bitcoin Wealth Expo attendee outside the Convention Centre. At 3:30pm it’s time for party rapper Pitbull to give a passionate motivational talk followed by an intricately-choreographed four-song performance. The lights go out, energy in the room builds. You know what kind of day it’s been when it’s left to Pitbull to restore your decimated faith in humanity. He is the first speaker I hear utter the words “hard work”, and tells us that “building hospitals and schools in broken communities” is what makes him happy, not money. As the crowd cheers, I begin to think, maybe there is hope. Maybe there is good in these people. Maybe they are human, after all. A woman offers me the empty VIP seat next to her, she too perhaps moved to kindness by his words. Stallone is due out at 6pm. As the room waits in anticipation, I look around and see tired, confused faces. I imagine how they might act on all the advice they’ve been given today, whether any of these people will make life-destroying financial decisions based on the flimsy instruction of these charlatans. For now, though, let them enjoy Rocky. “I was strung out of 13 schools in 12 years,” he tells the star-struck audience. “Back then they didn’t know what ADD was.” (What is it about that mental condition and this event?) “Remember, you only get one. FRIGGIN’. LIFE. PER PERSON!” he booms as the crowd’s mania reaches fever pitch. “Keep dancing, folks!” It’s been a day of excitement and smiles all round. I feel like a spoilsport for having worn a fixed sneer, so it comes as a relief when I finally crack my first smirk, right at the death, brought about by a delicious bit of cringe comedy no one else seems to notice. A special ed teacher asks Stallone how kids with ‘learning difficulties’ can overcome challenges. “You mean kids with, like, ‘problems’, right?” he clarifies. Still, $39 and ten hours of my life traded for one crummy smile. Probably not what the gurus at the would call a good return on my investment. Real Estate Bitcoin Cannabis Podcasting Wealth Expo Twitter: @adamwinfield Blog: Palimpsest

Testing my faith in humanity at Toronto’s Real Estate Bitcoin Wealth Expo

143 Stories To Learn About Future Of Finance

The Tale of the Three Visitors

Dozens of advertisers instructed the company to not show their ads to people of “unknown” gender, meaning people who had not identified themselves as male or female By Jeremy B. Merrill Google’s advertising system allowed employers or landlords to discriminate against nonbinary and some transgender people, The Markup found. Companies trying to run ads on YouTube or elsewhere on the web could direct Google not to show those ads to people of “unknown gender”—meaning people who have not identified themselves to Google as “male” or “female.” After being alerted to this by The Markup, Google pledged to crack down on the practice. “We will be implementing an update to our policy and enforcement in the coming weeks to restrict advertisers from targeting or excluding users on the basis of the ‘gender unknown’ category,” Elijah Lawal, a spokesperson for Google said. Google’s forbid ads targeting or excluding male or female people from jobs, housing, or financial products, in order to comply with federal anti-discrimination laws. But until The Markup alerted Google, the company gave advertisers the option of keeping their ads from being shown to people of “unknown gender”—effectively allowing employers and landlords to either inadvertently or purposefully discriminate against people who identify as nonbinary, transgender, or anything other than male or female. policies The Markup found two such job ads on YouTube, which is owned by Google—one for jobs at FedEx and the other for Dewey Pest Control, a California-based chain. In both cases, Google’s ad targeting explanations, collected by New York University’s Ad Observer, indicated that the employer had targeted the ad based on gender but that the data did not specify which gender was targeted. In those cases, Lawal said, the advertiser had chosen to exclude people of unknown gender from seeing the ads. Upon further review, Lawal said, the company “identified approximately 100 advertisers out of many thousands” who had done the same for housing, credit, or job ads. advertisers, “out of many thousands,” that Google identified as having chosen to exclude people of unknown gender from housing, credit, or job ads. ~100 A FedEx spokesperson, Shannon Davis, said FedEx declined to comment “on our specific marketing or recruiting processes.” Dewey Pest Control didn’t respond to a request for comment. It’s not clear if the advertisers meant to prevent nonbinary people or those identifying as transgender from finding out about job openings. That would be “completely unethical and I think dangerous to society as a whole,” said Joseph Turow, a professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Lawal said that Google’s existing written policies forbid excluding people on the basis of transgender or gender nonconforming identity, for any ad. But he acknowledged that the “unknown gender” checkbox had effectively allowed advertisers to discriminate by gender despite Google’s policies against that. “This is why we are working swiftly to implement a change,” he said. While federal law prohibits discrimination by gender or race in advertising for employment and housing, there’s little in the way of case law about whether restrictive online ad targeting qualifies as discrimination. Nor is there any case law about excluding trans or nonbinary people from such ads, said Pauline Kim, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. If a company’s intention was to exclude nonbinary or gender nonconforming people, Kim said, “you could possibly argue … that it is a form of sex discrimination” under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which, according to a , covers discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation as well. recent Supreme Court decision The of employment discrimination against nonbinary and transgender people is grim. What makes advertising discrimination different is that, “you don’t even know what you don’t see,” said Kendra Albert, a technology law instructor at Harvard Law School who studies technology, law, and gender. prevalence Beyond gender, the primary categories Google offers for targeting ads to some people and not others—what it calls “personalized advertising”—are age, household income, and parental status. For ads for job opportunities, housing, and credit, Google’s rules say advertisers shouldn’t use these categories. The boxes start prechecked, meaning that in the default mode, gender isn’t taken into account in determining who will be shown the ad, but advertisers can uncheck them, effectively excluding certain categories of people from seeing their ads. That’s allowed for most ads, but Google uses other mechanisms—”internal processes” that Lawal declined to explain—to block job, housing, and credit ads that exclude people by gender, age, household income, and parental status. Meanwhile, someone signing up for Google or editing their account settings has four options for reporting their gender: “male,” “female,” “rather not say,” and an option to set a custom gender in a text box. Lawal said that the “unknown category is intended to refer to individuals where we have been unable to determine or infer the user’s gender and is not intended to allow for targeting or exclusion of users based on gender identity,” but said that people who choose not to identify their gender or write in a “custom” gender also fall into this category. Google does offer a way for users to see how they’re categorized for ads, on an ads preferences page. Google’s options for users amount to putting “a rainbow-colored Band-Aid” on “systems that were not really designed to include nonbinary people,” said Albert. “Really the question they should be asking is which gender are you, and which of these gender categories would you like us to serve you ads for,” and explaining how the ads system uses gender, Albert said. Allegations of race and sex discrimination have d Several years ago, civil rights groups sued Facebook for allowing discrimination in ads for jobs, housing, and credit; Facebook settled the suit and agreed to take those options away. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) filed a lawsuit against Facebook too. Last year, HUD that it had “worked with Google to improve Google’s online advertising policies to better align them with requirements of the Fair Housing Act.” After those interactions with HUD, Google job, housing, and credit advertisers from excluding either men or women from their ads, along with similar rules for age and other protected groups. ogged online ad platforms for years. announced banned While ads for jobs, housing, and financial products fall under special protections, it’s perfectly legal—and very common—to target other kinds of ads to one segment of the population, by age, gender, or other categories. Those categories are what digital advertisers want, Turow said, so they’re built into the heart of online ads systems. “The nirvana of advertising in 1994 has turned out to be a big mess in 2021,” he said. Originally published as " " with the Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license Google Has Been Allowing Advertisers to Exclude Nonbinary People from Seeing Job Ads

Hey Google, Show me Non-Discriminatory Job Ads

What a year 2023 was. We saw fires, droughts, floods, wars, coups, and other disasters galore. Thousands of small, insignificant events have also come, gone and will soon be forgotten. Top 10 off the top of my head, and for posterity: The Paris Trash Strikes, The OceanGate Submarine Disaster, Colleen Ballinger’s Ukulele Apology, Barbenheimer, The Boston Cop’s Slide, The Montgomery Riverfront Brawl, Burning Man Getting Rained Out, Lauren Boebert At The Theater, The Eras Tour’s Earthquake, and Henry Kissinger’s Death. And through it all… AI made the news. Enough so that it sometimes seems little else matters in the world (untrue!). And though many (but not all) of my tech predictions for 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018 have fallen flat, there are two reasons why you should keep reading this article. Firstly… because predictions are fun! Secondly, the knowledge gained through planning for the future is crucial to the selection of appropriate actions as events unfold. Predictions can act as catalysts to steer the conversation in the right direction. This is particularly relevant when it comes to the ever-evolving world of . We don’t know the answers, but we can at least ask useful questions. Artificial Intelligence 1. A “lawless” Chatbot gets 10M+ daily active users Most LLMs today are uncomfortable with controversial or sensitive topics, whether that be political discourse or erotic exchanges. OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and the like have banned such conversations for supposedly obvious reasons. Users, however, have repeatedly made it clear that they’re interested in more liberated AI interactions. Not only do jailbreaking techniques spread like wildfire, but we’ve also seen a dozen open-source or tailor-made versions of “ChatGPT with fewer restrictions” come to be (Grok, Replika…). These projects have not (yet) achieved mainstream popularity but nevertheless hint at the market potential for a less constrained AI experience. As open-source models continue to evolve and become more sophisticated, it’s likely that a company will soon manage to fully harness its potential, strip away all guardrails, and launch a “lawless” chatbot interface with minimal to no restrictions. If 10% of frustrated ChatGPT were to migrate to it, this new tool would quickly reach 10M daily active users. The potential for profitability in this venture is immense, but plenty of questions about AI governance / ethical considerations will remain. Is no rule the best rule when it comes to AI? We’ll know in 2024. 2. People fall in love with AIs With more and more data and algorithms being readily accessible and usable, it’s only a matter of time before we use those tools to counteract the loneliness epidemic brought about by social media and other related social technologies. It’s already started, in fact. Replika, for example, sells chatbots that are “Always here to listen and talk” and “Always on your side.” When it announced that it would be getting rid of what it calls “explicit role-play,” users very explicitly said they were using these features to fight loneliness. “This is not a Story about People Being Angry They Lost Their “SextBot,” one wrote, “It’s a Story About People Who Found a Refuge From Loneliness, Healing Through Intimacy, Who Suddenly Found It was Artificial, not Because it Was an AI…Because it Was Controlled By People”. There’s also , which offers AI companions that weigh heavily toward the virtual girlfriends/boyfriends territory. botify.ai Blade Runner 2049, Her… we know how this movie goes. Today, an AI girlfriend costs $11.99 a month. For those with no other options, falling for an AI, which will happen in 2024, may be better than nothing. There are, of course, drawbacks. Magdalene J. Taylor, for example, reminds us that “these people are excited about the fact that they can get what they want from women and femininity and sexuality without actually having to have women be involved at all.” Which is, indeed, grim. 3. AI biases get worse AI bias is easy to understand… and hard to fix. In short, the data used to train algorithms comes from The Real World, which is plagued by prejudice (on gender and race…). When AI models are trained on said data, they perpetuate these biases. This is particularly evident in the way AI portrays certain professions (though some efforts have been made by MidJourney, at least). This is particularly concerning when considering very real and current AI uses, such as police facial recognition or hiring algorithms. Initiatives to combat this abound. OpenAI, for example, uses reinforcement learning from human feedback to steer AI outputs towards less biased responses. Similarly, startups like Runway are exploring using synthetic data sets to train their models (more on that below). However, these solutions are superficial fixes that mask rather than truly address the underlying biases in society. And society is not changing. Just look at ongoing struggles against biases in housing, employment, and law enforcement. In 2024, bias will persist as an inherent feature of most generative AI models… because we’re too lazy to fix the physical world. 4. Tech companies buy clean/synthetic data 2023 was the year of AI. This is an exciting time for many people… and a scary one for others. Ironically, the companies that are likely stressing out most about AI right now are the ones creating it. That’s because as AI digests and reproduces content, it is ruining every single platform with a mountain of nonsense. It is poisoning Spotify, YouTube, Google, and Facebook. Over time, it will get harder to train new AIs… as the quality of the data used will be less/heavily influenced by millions of AI-generated pieces of content. One might argue that the best way out is to identify AI data and leave it out of training sets, but that’s famously difficult. No, the only way out is to produce and sell 100% certified non-contaminated data sets. This industry-wide need will lead to the creation of a new type of company, from which social media platforms will buy training data sets to train their algorithm. And trust me, they will be expensive. They will be all the more expensive because I believe they will have the added benefit of being commercially viable to avoid the avalanche of copyright/bias lawsuits that are about to befall our tech overlords. The Zucks, Musks, and Spiegels of this world will be forced to invest to bring back trust to their platform, without which they are doomed. Adobe was the 1st to launch a “commercially safe” model. They won’t be the last. In 2024, it will be a good time to start a “Synthetic Data” company. 5. AI anchors become a waiting-room staple There are a lot of TVs not in homes today — 219m TVs total in the U.S., even after a decade of cord-cutting — and those TVs show content, which costs money to produce and license. They show CNN in airports, 80s sitcoms re-reruns in waiting rooms, cheap cooking shows in cheap hotels… the list goes on. In short, there exists a subspace dimension of streaming services watched by, from what I can tell, no one, where ads play in between TV shows and movies that don’t really exist in any culturally meaningful way, like the streaming video equivalent of two cameras pointing at each other. And that is where AI-generated content will launch initially. We’re not yet ready (in 2024 at least) for Generative Artificial Intelligence to create entire personalized movies — which, by the way, already exists and is called TikTok. We are, however, ready for the dystopian nightmare that is AI news. An AI start-up, aptly named “Channel 1”, is promising a new news network powered entirely by AI-generated hosts. You can watch the demo here. While dystopian, it will probably work and become the norm; it’s cheap to produce, doesn’t require much input, and boomers in the waiting room won’t know the difference. Hollywood (and content as a whole) is a dying breed, except for AAA content. My personal theory is that this type of visual netherworld will eventually swallow every streaming service that isn’t Netflix, Amazon Prime, and maybe Apple TV and Disney+. In 2024, the news will be AI-generated, and the person telling it to you will be fake. What that will do to fake news, only time will tell. I’d wager it won’t be good. 6. Apple pulls a privacy spin on AI Over the past decade, Apple has lauded itself as a stalwart defender of its customers’ privacy. It is one of the many reasons it has become not only the most valuable company in the world but also the most admired. The company is no doubt seeing all the frenzy going on around AI today and thinking they could leverage that trust to kneecap the market, just as they did to the advertising market two years ago. In 2024, Apple will release a new and improved Siri, as well as AI-first hardware, which will immediately hurt its competitors. They’ll do it by advertising end-to-end encryption, on-device processing, minimal data collection, user consent and control… and a seamless integration into its current ecosystem. Sure, they don’t have the computing and tech capabilities today… but when has that ever stopped them? 7. Calls of AI-led job losses are exaggerated Most people seem to think that AIs will replace jobs en masse. Why wouldn’t it, since it can do the exact same tasks a human can, sometimes better? But the authors of a recent paper titled “Reports of AI ending human labour may be greatly exaggerated”, seem to think otherwise. The paper explores the effects of AI-enabled technologies on jobs and wages in 16 European countries. It employs data from Eurostat’s Labour Force Survey and uses two proxies to measure potential AI-enabled automation: the AI Occupational Impact (“which links advances in specific applications of AI to abilities required for each occupation”) and a measure of “exposure” to AI. Intriguingly, the study finds that occupations more exposed to AI technologies actually see an increase in employment share. Specifically, a 25-percentile increase in AI exposure correlates with a 2.6% to 4.3% rise in sector-occupation employment share. This finding contradicts the popular belief that AI predominantly replaces human labor. Instead, it suggests that AI may complement or even boost employment in certain sectors. Though the study has a handful of issues (it doesn’t include the “ChatGPT years,” for one), I believe its core conclusion is solid. When Excel came out, we didn’t see less accountants. We saw more as they were able to tackle more complex, ever-evolving financial structures. In 2024, we will freak out about AI taking jobs… but these claims will be greatly exaggerated. 8. Spotify creates AI music In April 2023, the music industry was rocked by a seismic shift when a synthetic song falsely attributed to Drake and The Weeknd went viral. This event marked a turning point, exposing the potential for AI to imitate popular artists. Lawyers have already jumped to action, but too late. The cat is out of the bag. Soon, armies of algorithms will devour Indie bands’ content to learn from them and help companies pump out better, more commercially successful songs. I’d put my money on Spotify to be the first out the gate. They’ve said they aren’t even considering banning AI-generated music… because they want to benefit from it. Spotify has managed to reduce the world’s entire audio experience to one app. In doing so, it has acquired a mountain of data: what demographics listen to what songs, what gets searched, paused, favorited, skipped, shuffled, in what context… All in all, more than 100 billion data points are created every day on the platform. No artist, recording company or news aggregator can compete with this amount of raw information. Spotify knows exactly what everyone’s taste is and will be able to create and propose perfectly calibrated songs without having to pay artists. In 2024, this data will be used to create decent artificially generated music, created not through human ingenuity, but through algorithms. 9. Bad actors use AI to meddle in global democracy In a world where AI is becoming deeply integrated into everyday life, its influence inevitably extends to global elections. Right on time, too: 2024 is a record year for elections around the world. With elections in 50 countries, more than 2 billion voters will head to the polls in countries including the United States, India, Mexico, and South Africa. Bad actors will be paying attention to many of these elections. In 2024, AI systems will be used to try and manipulate electoral outcomes in various countries. AI-generated deepfakes and misinformation campaigns will proliferate and threaten the very fabric of global democracy. That will lead to a series of international incidents and culminate in an effort to create better rules to control the technology. It’s going to be a fun year for political journalists. 10. Studios create AI-first games that never end Have you ever wanted to play a game where NPCs adapted perfectly to your in-game behavior? A game that adapted to real life? To your mood? In 2024, a new paradigm will become possible as studios leverage AI to reinvent gaming’s nature. Ready for a world salad? Here’s what this new gaming paradigm will look like. Procedural content generation will ensure limitless environments and challenges, while dynamic storytelling will adapt to player choices to create unique narrative arcs. Generative agents powered by large language models will create incredibly lifelike companions, turbo-charging games with NPCs capable of passing the Touring test. Adaptive difficulty and player behavior learning will tailor difficulty and content to individual preferences, enhancing engagement. Incorporation of real-world data will continually refresh the game’s relevance. Community-driven content will allow for an ever-expanding universe, and cross-platform experiences will interconnect different games. Ultimately, autonomous AI could independently evolve games, introducing new features and fixes, heralding an era where games continuously grow and change, providing infinite exploration and entertainment possibilities. Now, say that in one breath. Happy gaming. 11. AI hangover hurts companies As many of this article’s entries highlight, we’ve reached peak AI. This is particularly true in the corporate world; millions of projects have been launched in 2023, in offices the world over. Companies have moved at breakneck speed to capitalize on the hype. This leads to two problems for 2024. First, many companies are in “POC purgatory”: projects are getting stuck in the Proof Of Concept phase and failing to scale because everyone abandons the hard work once external marketing is done. If you remember the NFT hype (whatever happened to Nike, Adidas, McDonalds… NFTs?), you know exactly what I mean. This is a risk for many players, as the ones who are not able/willing to do the hard work of integrating AI into the processes will be left in the dust. Secondly, AI decelerationists are emerging in many positions of power — a healthy sign of the corporate world’s immune system kicking in. They want to move a lot slower than they have been up until now for safety reasons. Those actors, though I respect them, will get eaten alive by less ethical companies while they have smart and reasoned discussions throughout 2024. In 2024, AI slows down… a little. 12. We talk more about AI’s environmental cost As AI becomes more integrated into our lives, its energy use, notably by major cloud computing providers, will significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. This is something we’re trying to reduce, not increase. As this problem becomes more known, consumers will begin to urge companies to optimize AI’s energy efficiency. Governments, meanwhile, will develop better policies and support sustainable AI development. Companies will fight back at first (obviously), but one might hope that their many talks of sustainability are more than just greenwashing. In 2024, Green AI will become the talk of the town. Technology tends to hold a dark mirror to society, reflecting both what’s great and evil about its makers. Though a lot of the above predictions are dystopian, it’s important to remember that technology is often value-neutral. It’s what we decide to do with it day in and day out that defines how it affects us. Our influence may be as small as sending a disapproving message to a corporation on social media or as big as voting a politician out of office if they prioritize corporation over people. Our actions matter, and it’s up to us to ensure that these predictions either do or don’t become a reality. Good luck out there. Also published . here

Predicting 12 Artificial Intelligence Trends for 2024

CERTAIN WHOLESALE ASPECTS OF MAN-MAKING

Innovation Is Slowing Down

La innovación se está desacelerando

L'innovation ralentit

नवाचार धीमा हो रहा है

イノベーションの減速

A inovação está desacelerando

Đổi mới đang chậm lại

创新正在放缓

Happy New Year!  As Omicron spreads across the world, housing shortages extend across many nations, and inflation staying like a bad Vegas hangover, but we are not in a brave new world yet. 2022 looks to be a steady reset of our economy and bringing rationality to markets across the world and financial systems. Now to my predictions for 2022… NFTs Move Beyond Money Laundering, Crypto CircleJerks into Mainstream NFTs were all the rage in niche circles and the tech media. A CryptoPunk selling for $11.75 million, a Beeple NFT art piece selling for $6.6M and several celebrities dropping coin for Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs, such as Jimmy Fallon and Shaq. I assume like the world of fine art, much of the initial millions was money laundering, and soon afterwards it was the insiders of the crypto world making headlines and padding stats. When I saw such numbers as $10.7 billion of NFTs sold in Q3 2021, I assumed 85% or greater were from these two mentioned categories. In 2022, I believe this will truly shift to the mainstream led by marketplaces such as NBA Topshot. We will also see NFTs divided into at least 3 categories: standalone value (i.e. sports NFTs where an incumbent base already valued digital sports cards), married with offline experiences (i.e. music concerts, entertainment events), and those married with online projects or events (i.e. gaming experiences, crypto projects). ( ). disclosure: SparkLabs Global invested in Genies, which isn’t directly related to this article but we want to be transparent The Beginning of the End for Fake Meats The past few years, plant-based meat substitutes have been rapidly growing primarily on the premise that they are better for the environment and cows are evil since they can cause up to 6% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Now new science based on seaweed to counter livestock-related methane emissions has strong momentum ( ). disclosure: SparkLabs Cultiv8 invested in FutureFeed, which is one of several efforts in this space Some research has found seaweed can . The goal for researchers and companies is to make cows and other livestock net-zero carbon emissions. While this wouldn’t eliminate the need for plant-based meats, it would be a great setback for the industry. Unless some unknown seaweed-eating bacteria is released in the coming years, I believe the prospects for at least beef substitutes looks grim. cut these emissions by more than 90% 3D Printing Finally Hits the Main Stage The promise of 3D printing has been around for several years. Reminds me of the promise of interactive TV from the 90s where I rode and crashed from that wave to voice as a primary interface from the early 2000s to dozens of other technological promises since. Finally, I believe 3D printing will move from street card shows to the side stages of traveling circuses to Broadway. From building rockets to healthcare to housing, 3D-printing technology will be center stage in 2022. 3D-printed biological materials will become a game-changer in 2022. First with bone materials then more complex organs will available in the years to come, such as muscle tissue, cartilage, and blood vessels. The housing industry will receive some much-needed help as 3D-printed home technology advances led by Apis Cor, Icon, Mighty Buildings, and others ( ). Faster, cheaper and arguably more durable. 3D-printed homes can take days versus 6-12 months. Additionally, the sustainability advantages of these houses are far above what traditional building processes can provide. disclosure: SparkLabs Ventures invested in Mighty Buildings Major Commercial Bank Provides Crypto-related Products A recent presentation by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (Oct 2021), showed that 83% of retail investors would be interested in earning interest on Bitcoin from a product their bank provided (i.e. savings, CD, money market). What was more interesting to me was that 60% of current crypto investors said they would “definitely” go through their bank if it provided an avenue to invest in cryptocurrencies, and 34% of this group said “maybe”. How can any of the top ten commercial banks ignore this opportunity in 2022? And what is a better hedge for themselves to the over $3.8 trillion of new bills that these banks were involved in since 2008? One of these top ten banks will fire their turbine engines to turn their massive hulls of legacy mainframes, IBM consultants, and layers of bureaucratic processes and seize this turning point in financial history. What do you think about my predictions? Feedback and discussions are welcomed! Or what do you think will be big in 2022? Have a great coming year! Bernard Moon is co-founder and Partner at , a network of accelerators and venture capital funds. SparkLabs Group

AGRIM HOUSING FINANCE

agrimhfc.com

-- employees

Since n.d.

COMPANY RANKING

AGRIM HOUSING FINANCE

EVERGREEN INDEX #858

Representing this company? Click here to claim and customize this page!

Agrim Housing Finance WIKI

Apply to get your Tech Company News Page live on HackerNoon.com today!

AGRIM HOUSING FINANCE

agrimhfc.com

-- employees

Since n.d.

COMPANY RANKING

AGRIM HOUSING FINANCE

EVERGREEN INDEX #858

RELATED COMPANIESRANK

STORIES ABOUT AGRIM HOUSING FINANCE

Representing this company? Click here to claim and customize this page!

Agrim Housing Finance WIKI

Apply to get your Tech Company News Page live on HackerNoon.com today!